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Will a slow cpu limit my write speed significantly?
I have a PII 333 (celeron) with ample RAM (192M), a samsung SW-248F
(2M cache), and am writing at only about 14x (on 40x TY media).

speed is limited only when you burn directly Audio CD from mp3 files.

and check that DMA is enabled and you can burn faster freely

Nope, my speed is slow when writing data. DMA is eneabled.

Yes it does.

I have a Celeron 366 O/C to 533-ish system here and above around 40x the machine has a hard time keeping up I've noticed under these conditions that Nero's extra cache actually gets in the way -- use a different program (say CloneCD) and there is no problem (well it starts to get a little flaky as well over 48x but it is not as pronounced).

This is with UDMA or multiword-DMA, and the motherboard is an Abit with Intel BX chipset so I can't see it being the IDE ports being to blame.

I've got a celery 300a oc to 464 and have no problems burning at 48x on an ABIT BH-6. Oh, should mention that I'm running win98. OTOH, I've got a work machine pos Gateway P2-400 that cant even burn at 12x under WinNT4 (the burner is a 32xSony (liteon) smartburn kicks in sometimes at that speed). So I suspect that the OS may be part of your problem.

Well, I'm using win98 SE. Maybe I'll try booting over to linux and see if things are faster, but CDRW support their can be a bit spotty...

How fast is your hard drive, is it able to keep up? Can you verify if the smartburn/burnproof or what ever is used in the drive is kicking? If thats the case then you hd cant keep up. Try defraging and cleaning up the disk a little. You may want to turn off any applications that may be running in the background, like antivirus and firewall software.

Hope this helps

Slow cpu affects the write speed depending on what you type of burn you are doing. As someone mentioned before, if you are burning an audio CD or something where the cpu is converting one file format into another, then you may see a slowdown in burn speed. In that case, I would suggest doing a file conversion for example to WAV from MP3 before burning the CD. I have a PIII 866 Mhz with 320 mb of ram and it burns perfectly at 48x. Some good advice would be to defrag your drives, clean up some space etc.

coolestnitish wrote:I have a PIII 866 Mhz with 320 mb of ram and it burns perfectly at 48x.

My how times have changed. An 866 MHz PIII is considered slow?? My first computer contained a 6502 running at, I suppose, a few hundred kHz. But it came with 8 KBytes of RAM!!!

Anyway, yes, an 866 MHz PIII shouldn't have any trouble at all keeping up with a 48x CD-RW drive.

cfitz

cfitz wrote:My first computer contained a 6502 running at, I suppose, a few hundred kHz. But it came with 8 KBytes of RAM!!!

what was that computer, cfitz?
i don't remember a 6502 computer with 8KB.
i was lucky, my first computer - my dad bought me a TI-99/4A, was quite a thing back then.
can't recall if it had 16 or 48K RAM.
my next one was a 6502 as well - Apple IIe, with 128K! (later upgraded to 640) and an 80-column screen card!!! WOW

dodecahedron wrote:what was that computer, cfitz?
i don't remember a 6502 computer with 8KB.

An Ohio Scientific C1P. It came with built-in BASIC in ROM, a bare-bones machine code monitor, and a 24x24 (I think - it's all a little hazy now ) black and white character graphics video system that displayed on a regular television via an RF modulator. Programs were stored on regular audio cassettes recorded on a standard tape deck (not included). Programs scrolled down the screen as they loaded from tape, and the loading was so slow that you could read the program code as it rolled by. But it was solidly reliable, more than I can say for the Atari 800 that succeeded it.

By the way, the 8 KByte RAM was an upgrade from the standard 4 KByte RAM!!

Strangely, a mysterious and wonderful storage device known as a "Winchester Hard Disc Drive" was available as an option for this humble little computer. It was absolutely pointless, of course, since even in those days of tiny hard drive storage capacity (1 MByte? 2 MBytes?? - again, it is hazy) the storage on a hard drive greatly overmatched the amount of data one could reasonably generate from a 8-KByte 6502 microcomputer. Not to mention that it was hideously expensive. Truly the only reason it was a potential option at all is because Ohio Scientific made mid-range business computers as well, for which the Winchester was really intended.

cfitz

what year?

Something like 1980 or 1981. I can't remember exactly.

cfitz

wow cfitz, you must be ancient.

aznjosh wrote:wow cfitz, you must be ancient.

Ouch. Tough crowd. We're going to have to teach these young whipper-snappers some manners!

I think "ancient" is pushing things a bit, but they don't call me CD-RW Curmudgeon for nothing...

And anyway, how can you be sure I wasn't a child prodigy, coding up my C1P as a two-year old? Or is 25 years old "ancient" too?

cfitz

yeah.
i guess us "ancient" types have to be careful so we don't stumble over all of these babies crawling on the floor

Ancient. Tsk

My first computer was a 1K Sinclair ZX81 (I think these were marketed under the Timex banner in the US) which came in kit form, so I had to build it myself. It came with a 16K RAM pack which plugged into the back, and had a nasty habit of falling out just as you were typing programs into it It had a 3.5MHz Zilog Z80 processor, and the screen went blank when it was "thinking" (!!!) in BASIC.

There were around 2,500 software titles made for this little gem, and they all fit onto a single ZIP disc now lol.

yeah, i remember the ZX81, they were funny little things.

weird keyboard!

what an incredible thing when the ZX Spectrum came along...16K! and color!!!!!